Friday, 22 February 2008
Sifting through the wreckage
Wherever things go wrong most of the time, people will always try to explain why, in many imaginative ways. Disasters at Blundell Park are variously attributed to the five-man midfield, the twelve-month year, European fishing quotas, decimal coinage, or Danny Boshell, Paul Bolland and Austin Mitchell all being natives of West Yorkshire.
The explanations can be similarly interesting when our industries and public services suffer, as they often do, the equivalent of one of Town's devastating double relegations.
True, explanation sometimes matters less than retaliation, and when I pay £1.70 to ride two and a bit miles on a bus running 15 minutes late on empty roads, I just spend the journey dreaming up innovative tortures for the bus company's chief executive.
But there is a compelling theory that people are 'promoted to their level of incompetence'. This means that if you're good at your job, you're given a more demanding job, and if you're good at that then you get one that's harder still, and so on until you reach a job you're absolutely hopeless at.
Then you don't get promoted any more – you just keep doing the job badly, and eventually the administrators are auctioning your PC from under your nose and the Government is taking you into temporary public ownership to stop the banking system collapsing and taking the whole of Western civilisation with it.
Superficially, football seems immune to this vulnerability. If a player is promoted from the youth team to the reserves and finally the first team, but is then found wanting, the manager can just drop him or sell him on.
Likewise, a coach who rises through the ranks but then doesn't really cut it as the first team manager can easily be sacked by the chairman. If he's lucky, like Graham Rodger, he might get his old job back, lower down the hierarchy. And ideally the chairmen of First and Stagecoach would be redeployed cleaning discarded bubblegum off the seats.
But a player can't be dropped if no replacement is available. Town's opponents tomorrow, Wrexham, recently lost six games on the trot, conceding 14 goals, then put Gavin Ward in goal to replace Anthony Williams. When Williams played for us, our opponents scored more or less every time they shot low to his left, but he kept his place all season because Town's only other goalkeeper was too busy revising for his mock GCSEs.
And ultimate responsibility for the performance of a club over time lies with the chairman and the board. If they have risen to their 'level of incompetence' (not that I'm suggesting this is the case at GTFC!) then there's nothing much you can do. When disgruntled fans sing "sack the board", the obvious question is "how, exactly?"
The explanations can be similarly interesting when our industries and public services suffer, as they often do, the equivalent of one of Town's devastating double relegations.
True, explanation sometimes matters less than retaliation, and when I pay £1.70 to ride two and a bit miles on a bus running 15 minutes late on empty roads, I just spend the journey dreaming up innovative tortures for the bus company's chief executive.
But there is a compelling theory that people are 'promoted to their level of incompetence'. This means that if you're good at your job, you're given a more demanding job, and if you're good at that then you get one that's harder still, and so on until you reach a job you're absolutely hopeless at.
Then you don't get promoted any more – you just keep doing the job badly, and eventually the administrators are auctioning your PC from under your nose and the Government is taking you into temporary public ownership to stop the banking system collapsing and taking the whole of Western civilisation with it.
Superficially, football seems immune to this vulnerability. If a player is promoted from the youth team to the reserves and finally the first team, but is then found wanting, the manager can just drop him or sell him on.
Likewise, a coach who rises through the ranks but then doesn't really cut it as the first team manager can easily be sacked by the chairman. If he's lucky, like Graham Rodger, he might get his old job back, lower down the hierarchy. And ideally the chairmen of First and Stagecoach would be redeployed cleaning discarded bubblegum off the seats.
But a player can't be dropped if no replacement is available. Town's opponents tomorrow, Wrexham, recently lost six games on the trot, conceding 14 goals, then put Gavin Ward in goal to replace Anthony Williams. When Williams played for us, our opponents scored more or less every time they shot low to his left, but he kept his place all season because Town's only other goalkeeper was too busy revising for his mock GCSEs.
And ultimate responsibility for the performance of a club over time lies with the chairman and the board. If they have risen to their 'level of incompetence' (not that I'm suggesting this is the case at GTFC!) then there's nothing much you can do. When disgruntled fans sing "sack the board", the obvious question is "how, exactly?"
Labels: blame, buses, business, failure, incompetence, relegation, rodger, williams, wrexham, yorkshire
Friday, 21 September 2007
Bucking the trend
Last year it was Graham Rodger not having "contacts". The year before, it was Russell Slade's direct style. Go back a bit further and it was Paul Groves playing and managing at the same time, and before you know it you're back to Alan Buckley in the 1990s, whose style wasn't direct enough. The moaners and groaners among Town's support are a fashion-conscious bunch: they have to have something new every season.
The lament in vogue this autumn is that Buckley's 4-5-1 formation is 'negative' and he should switch to 4-4-2. But some people will never be happy. Last weekend against Stockport, Town used the 4-4-2 system twice in one match, and they're still complaining.
Maybe everyone would be happy if we reverted to the 2-3-5 system. This suicidally attacking formation was the cause of all those 8-3 and 9-2 scores you see in the history books, as it was favoured for some time by managers in the early 20th century, and presumably also by Kevin Keegan at Newcastle, Ossie Ardiles at Tottenham and Town and Burnley in their 'Fright Night Special' in 2002.
But the thing is, really, that the infinite tactical subtleties of a match played for 90 minutes by 22 people over an area of more than 8,000 square yards just can't be adequately expressed or understood using a blunt system of three-digit shorthand – regardless of what we might think we might think we've learned about professional sport from staying up until 4am playing Football Manager on the computer.
Or as the manager himself has more succinctly put it: "If 4-5-1 is boring then what happened when we won 6-0 at Boston?"
And the one thing that never changes about fashion is change itself. If Buckley were to play 4-4-2 for the rest of his career, the moaners and groaners would find some other reason to boo the team or stay at home.
Indeed, you could bet some of the people now asking why they should part with their hard-earned cash to watch a five-man midfield are some of the same people who used to criticise the manager during his earlier spells at the club for never deviating from his beloved 4-4-2. Perhaps they'll even run out of football reasons one day, and they'll have to move on to actual fashion, and end up posting on the messageboards about new signings being put off by the embarrassing lack of Gucci and Prada gear in the manager's wardrobe.
But you'll never find our support here at Cod Almighty tossed weakly about by the winds of fashion. Well, I mean pessimism is just so last season.
The lament in vogue this autumn is that Buckley's 4-5-1 formation is 'negative' and he should switch to 4-4-2. But some people will never be happy. Last weekend against Stockport, Town used the 4-4-2 system twice in one match, and they're still complaining.
Maybe everyone would be happy if we reverted to the 2-3-5 system. This suicidally attacking formation was the cause of all those 8-3 and 9-2 scores you see in the history books, as it was favoured for some time by managers in the early 20th century, and presumably also by Kevin Keegan at Newcastle, Ossie Ardiles at Tottenham and Town and Burnley in their 'Fright Night Special' in 2002.
But the thing is, really, that the infinite tactical subtleties of a match played for 90 minutes by 22 people over an area of more than 8,000 square yards just can't be adequately expressed or understood using a blunt system of three-digit shorthand – regardless of what we might think we might think we've learned about professional sport from staying up until 4am playing Football Manager on the computer.
Or as the manager himself has more succinctly put it: "If 4-5-1 is boring then what happened when we won 6-0 at Boston?"
And the one thing that never changes about fashion is change itself. If Buckley were to play 4-4-2 for the rest of his career, the moaners and groaners would find some other reason to boo the team or stay at home.
Indeed, you could bet some of the people now asking why they should part with their hard-earned cash to watch a five-man midfield are some of the same people who used to criticise the manager during his earlier spells at the club for never deviating from his beloved 4-4-2. Perhaps they'll even run out of football reasons one day, and they'll have to move on to actual fashion, and end up posting on the messageboards about new signings being put off by the embarrassing lack of Gucci and Prada gear in the manager's wardrobe.
But you'll never find our support here at Cod Almighty tossed weakly about by the winds of fashion. Well, I mean pessimism is just so last season.
Labels: buckley, fashion, formation, groves, miserable, rodger, slade, systems, tactics
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